Crooked Trails and Straight by William MacLeod Raine (best large ebook reader .txt) 📖

He laughed a little and looked at her with eyes that narrowed like those of a cat basking in the sun. He had something the look of the larger members of the cat family—the soft long tread, the compact rippling muscles of a tame panther, and with these the threat that always lies behind its sleepy wariness.

“You’re a young lady of one idea. No use arguing with you, I reckon.”

“Not the least use. I’ve talked with Mrs. Wylie.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Do I know the lady?”

“She will know you. That is more to the point.”

“Did she say she knew me?” he purred.

“She will say it in court—if it ever comes to that.”

“Just what will she say, if you please.”

Kate told him in four sentences with a stinging directness that was the outstanding note of her, that and a fine self-forgetful courage.

“Is that all? Comes to this then, that she says I heard her scream, ran in, and saved your father’s life. Is that a penitentiary offense? I don’t say it oughtn’t to be, but is it?”

“You helped the villain take his body into the cellar. You plotted with him to hold Father a prisoner there.”

“Says that, does she—that she overheard us plotting?”

“Of course she did not overhear what you said. You took good care of that. But she knew you were conspiring.”

“Just naturally knew it without overhearing,” he derided. “And of course if I was in a plot I must have been Johnny-on-the-spot a good deal of the time. Hung round there a-plenty, I expect?”

He had touched on the weak spot of Mrs. Wylie’s testimony. The man who had saved Cullison’s life, after a long talk with Blackwell, had gone out of the Jack of Hearts and had not returned so far as she knew. For her former husband had sent her on an errand just before the prisoner was taken away and she did not know who had helped him.

Kate was silent.

“How would this do for an explanation?” he suggested lazily. “We’ll say just for the sake of argument that Mrs. Wylie’s story is true, that I did save your father’s life. We’ll put it that I did help carry him downstairs where it was cooler and that I did have a long talk with the fellow Blackwell. What would I be talking to him about, if I wasn’t reading the riot act to him? Ain’t it likely too that he would be sorry for what he did while he was angry at your father for butting in as he was having trouble with his wife? And after he had said he was sorry why shouldn’t I hit the road out of there? There’s no love lost between me and Luck Cullison. I wasn’t under any obligations to wrap him up in cotton and bring him back this side up with care to his anxious friends. If he chose later to take a hike out of town on p.d.q. hurry up business I ain’t to blame. And I reckon you’ll find a jury will agree with me.”

She had to admit to herself that he made out a plausible case. Not that she believed it for a moment. But very likely a jury would. As for his subsequent silence that could be explained by his desire not to mix himself in the affairs of one with whom he was upon unfriendly terms. The irrefutable fact that he had saved the life of Cullison would go a long way as presumptive proof of his innocence.

“I see you are wearing your gray hat again? What have you done with the brown one?”

She had flashed the question at him so unexpectedly that he was startled, but the wary mask fell again over the sardonic face.

“You take a right friendly interest in my hats, seems to me.”

“I know this much. Father took your hat by mistake from the club. You bought a brown one half an hour later. You used Father’s to manufacture evidence against him. If it isn’t true that he is your prisoner how does it come that you have your gray hat again? You must have taken it from him.”

He laughed uneasily. She had guessed the exact truth.

“In Arizona there are about forty thousand gray hats like this. Do you figure you can identify this one, Miss Cullison? And suppose your fairy tale of the Jack of Hearts is true, couldn’t I have swapped hats again while he lay there unconscious?”

She brushed his explanation aside with a woman’s superb indifference to logic.

“You can talk of course. I don’t care. It is all lies—lies. You have kidnapped Father and are holding him somewhere. Don’t you dare to hurt him. If you should—Oh, if you should—you will wish you had never been born.” The fierceness of her passion beat upon him like sudden summer hail.

He laughed slowly, well pleased. A lazy smoldering admiration shone in his half shuttered eyes.

“So you’re going to take it out of me, are you?”

A creature of moods, there came over her now a swift change. Every feature of her, the tense pose, the manner of defiant courage, softened indescribably. She was no longer an enemy bent on his destruction but a girl pleading for the father she loved.

“Why do you do it? You are a man. You want to fight fair. Tell me he is well. Tell me you will set him free.”

He forgot for the moment that he was a man with the toils of the law closing upon him, forgot that his success and even his liberty were at stake. He saw only a girl with the hunger of love in her wistful eyes, and knew that it lay in his power to bring back the laughter and the light into them.

“Suppose I can’t fight fair any longer. Suppose I’ve let myself get trapped and it isn’t up to me but to somebody else.”

“How do you mean?”

“Up to your father, say.”

“My father?”

“Yes. How could I turn him loose when the first thing he did would be to swear out a warrant for my arrest?”

“But he wouldn’t—not if you freed him.”

He laughed harshly. “I thought you knew him. He’s hard as nails.”

She recognized the justice of this appraisal. “But he is generous too. He stands by his friends.”

“I’m not his friend, not so you could notice it.” He laughed again, bitterly. “Not that it matters. Of course I was just putting a case. Nothing to it really.”

He was hedging because he thought he had gone too far, but she appeared not to notice it. Her eyes had the faraway look of one who communes with herself.

“If I could only see him and have a talk with him.”

“What good would that do?” he pretended to scoff.

But he watched her closely nevertheless.

“I think I could get him to do as I ask. He nearly always does.” Her gaze went swiftly back to him. “Let me talk with him. There’s a reason why he ought to be free now, one that would appeal to him.”

This was what he had come for, but now that she had met him half way he hesitated. If she should not succeed he would be worse off than before. He could neither hold her a prisoner nor free her to lead the pack of the law to his hiding place. On the other hand if Cullison thought they intended to keep her prisoner he would have to compromise. He dared not leave her in the hands of Lute Blackwell. Fendrick decided to take a chance. At the worst he could turn them both free and leave for Sonora.

“All right. I’ll take you to him. But you’ll have to do as I say.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I’m taking you to back my play. I tell you straight that Blackwell would like nothing better than to put a bullet through your father. But I’ve got a hold on the fellow that ties him. He’s got to do as I say. But if I’m not there and it comes to a showdown—if Bucky O’Connor for instance happens to stumble in—then it’s all off with Luck Cullison. Blackwell won’t hesitate a second. He’ll kill your father and make a bolt for it. That’s one reason why I’m taking you. I want to pile up witnesses against the fellow so as to make him go slow. But that’s not my main object. You’ve got to persuade Luck to come through with an agreement to let go of that Del Oro homestead and to promise not to prosecute us. He won’t do it to save his own life. He’s got to think you come there as my prisoner. See? He’s got to wrestle with the notion that you’re in the power of the damnedest villain that ever went unhung. I mean Blackwell. Let him chew on that proposition a while and see what he makes of it.”

She nodded, white to the lips. “Let us go at once, please. I don’t want to leave Father alone with that man.” She called across to the corral. “Manuel, saddle the pinto for me. Hurry!”

They rode together through the wind-swept sunlit land. From time to time his lazy glance embraced her, a supple graceful creature at perfect ease in the saddle. What was it about her that drew the eye so irresistibly? Prettier girls he had often seen. Her features were irregular, mouth and nose too large, face a little thin. Her contour lacked the softness, the allure that in some women was an unconscious invitation to cuddle. Tough as whipcord she might be, but in her there flowed a life vital and strong; dwelt a spirit brave and unconquerable. She seemed to him as little subtle as any woman he had ever met. This directness came no doubt from living so far from feminine influences. But he had a feeling that if a man once wakened her to love, the instinct of sex would spring full-grown into being.

They talked of the interests common to the country, of how the spring rains had helped the range, of Shorty McCabe’s broken leg, of the new school district that was being formed. Before she knew it Kate was listening to his defense of himself in the campaign between him and her father. He found her a partisan beyond chance of conversion. Yet she heard patiently his justification.

“I didn’t make the conditions that are here. I have to accept them. The government establishes forest reserves on the range. No use ramming my head against a stone wall. Uncle Sam is bigger than we are. Your father and his friends got stubborn. I didn’t.”

“No, you were very wise,” she admitted dryly.

“You mean because I adapted myself to the conditions and made the best of them. Why shouldn’t I?” he flushed.

“Father’s cattle had run over that range thirty years almost. What right had you to take it from him?”

“Conditions change. He wouldn’t see it. I did. As for the right of it—well, Luck ain’t king of the valley just because he thinks he is.”

She began to grow angry. A dull flush burned through the tan of her cheeks.

“So you bought sheep and brought them in to ruin the range, knowing that they would cut the feeding ground to pieces, kill the roots of vegetation with their sharp hoofs, and finally fill the country with little gullies to carry off the water that ought to sink into the ground.”

“Sheep ain’t so bad if they are run right.”

“It depends where they run. This is no place for them.”

“That’s what you hear your father say. He’s prejudiced.”

“And you’re not, I suppose.”

“I’m more reasonable than he is.”

“Yes, you are,” she flung back at him irritably.

Open country lay before them. They had come out from a stretch of heavy underbrush. Catclaw had been snatching at their legs.